


41 Hours

by Magik3



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: F/F, Feels, Fucking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2019-09-17 21:52:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16982487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magik3/pseuds/Magik3
Summary: “Ha! Just like old times,” Kitty says. “Except, you know, for everything else.”Chapter One: Hours 1-9





	1. Hours 1 through 9

**Author's Note:**

> Events happening in the middle of All-New X-Men #18 between when Kitty and Illyana are together talking in the snow and when we see them again outside 41 hours later.

“Ha! Just like old times,” Kitty says. “Except, you know, for everything else.”  
  
But she doesn’t stop holding me, with her whole body, like old times, like always. And I soften into her because I can’t help it; I was always softest with her.  
  
We talk about the things we already know about each other, the last few years, things we’d heard from others, easy topics. When she talks, I inhale her words, her breath; the parts of me that didn’t know how to rest, do. When I talk, her fingers play with the edges of my uniform, with my fingers, and I get the feeling her fingertips are a few steps ahead of her mind.  
  
“Aren’t you freezing?” she asks, a hand on my back, bare on my bare skin because she’d taken off her glove to place her fingers at the small of my back.  
  
“Not yet. You know, magic. Are you?”  
  
“A little. This suit isn’t that insulated, not for sitting in snow. I could phase, but I don’t want to,” she says.  
  
“Don’t want you to either. Should we go somewhere? Food? Anywhere you want.” I don’t want this quiet bubble of us to end.  
  
“Let’s go change while we think about it,” she says.  
  
We walk back to base, her fingers tangling with mine a few times, not holding hands but walking close enough we nearly are. Her fingertips are a bit ahead of us both, mine just catching up.  
  
In my room, I throw on black jeans and, after a moment of dithering, a black sweater, boots, dithering more over silver earrings, necklace, telling myself this is ridiculous. Put my hair up, take it down, put it up again differently. Give myself a stern shake and stomp along the hall to Kitty’s room.  
  
She opens the door, holding an earring to her ear. “This one?” Three beads, the middle one swirly, but I only glance at it because she’s barefoot and bare-legged in a burgundy skirt with a semi-transparent black and white polkadot shirt that—could she teach in that? What was that shirt even for?  
  
“Compared to?” I ask, still contemplating grown-up Professor Pryde. Not that we hadn’t been grown for years, but I’d seen her mainly in the field, in our uniforms, putting a beatdown on whoever. Not in a businesslike skirt and oddly stylish polkadots. Not with her living down the hall from me, answering her door only half-dressed to go out, almost like old times.  
  
She plucks an earring off the desk and holds it to her other ear: blue and purple, like her old Shadowcat uniform.  
  
“That one. It’s cute with the ponytail.”  
  
“You like it up?” She grins and flips her hair in a flash of teenaged Kitty.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“I like your hair like that too. Help me pick a top,” Kitty says.  
  
“You’re already wearing—” I shut myself up because she’s undoing the top button of that shirt. Her fingertips should definitely keep leading the way.  
  
Her room has nowhere to sit but the bed and the desk chair, draped with shirts. I kick off my boots and stretch back on the bed. How many times did we do this as teens? But that is definitely not a teenaged Kitty bra, all sleek fabric and curving lines with dips in the just-right places.  
  
Kitty stands in front of her closet in her bra and skirt, pulls out a black shirt on the hanger and holds it in front of her.  
  
“Maybe,” I say. “What else?”  
  
She puts that shirt back, holds up a sweater striped gray and faded blue.  
  
I swallow, try to get my mouth less dry so that I don’t croak out my words. “I like that blue. Maybe.”  
  
She turns back to the closet. Her back has muscled up nicely, still soft but shapes of strength there too.  
  
“Are you going to say ‘maybe’ to every top I have in this closet?” she asks, hint of laughter in her voice. I think she wants me to keep saying "maybe," to stay in her bed like this.  
  
“I am. Twice. Unless you’re really hungry,” I say.  
  
She turns back to me, hungry. Definitely very hungry. No pretense of picking up another shirt, half bare in her bra and skirt without stockings, looking like a panther, hunting, and a housecat, playing, and very much my Kitty.  
  
Do I care if this is a rebound? Fuck no. Kitty can rebound with me every day of the year if she wants.  
  
I shove off the bed, three quick steps to pin her against the open closet door. One hand curling around the back of her neck, my thigh pressing between her legs.  
  
“Say ‘yes,’” I tell her.  
  
She smirks. “Da.”  
  
Trust her to do what I ask and not at the same time; I like bratty Kitty. And she’s so fucking hot speaking Russian and staring at me like she wants to put me in her mouth. I’m still laughing, low in my chest, as I find her lips with mine, the sound turning into a growl. Kissing, loose and awkward, off-beat for a breath, until our lips find their fit.  
  
I hook a finger under the front of her bra and say, “Off.” She phases it off, then grabs my sweater at the shoulder, catching the strap of my bra too, and phases both off me.  
  
We stagger three steps, fall across the bed with me on top. I need her so much I’m shaking, trying to remember and memorize her body, trying not to just shove her skirt and panties out of the way. Kissing her neck and shoulders, her face, her lips, while her hands move over my back and sides.  
  
I’m trying to slow down and I can’t. She tugs my hand down under her skirt. My fingers shove aside the wet crotch of her underwear and find her. I slide two fingers inside her, but she grabs my elbow and jerks me toward her, wrapping one leg around my hip so she’s opened wide to me.  
  
Index finger bent forward, three hard and straight, I fuck her with intensity, devotion, listening only to her body. Leaning down over her, pinning her to the bed, both of us kissing hard enough to bruise, then open and needy, in each other’s mouths. Her fingernails digging into my shoulders. My thumb brushing her clit, feeling it swell and strain and want, not caring if I’m not rubbing hard enough because I can do this forever.  
  
At some point, I’m dimly aware that the rickety metal bed is banging the wall every time I thrust into her. How can I care about that when her hard nipples brush against me every time my arm pistons up and my fingers fill her? When I hit the just right spots and her fingers clench and her mouth opens with sounds she hadn’t dared make when we were young together.  
  
*  
  
Outside in the hall, Goldballs turns to Morph, saying, “Whoa, if the Weapon X facility is rocking, don’t come knocking. Are we allowed to have sex in our rooms? Whose room is that?”  
  
“Professor Pryde’s,” Morph says, looking half sour, half amazed.  
  
“No way.”  
  
A string of growled Russian filters through the door.  
  
“Is she back with Colossus?” Goldballs asks. “Why does he sound like a really angry girl?”  
  
“Pretty sure that’s Magik.”  
  
“Sounds like it should be Colossus.”  
  
“You never heard it from me, but I heard she breaks a lot more stuff than he does in the bedroom.”  
  
*  
  
In the dining hall, all three cuckoos look up at the same time.  
  
Irma: “Literal holy fuck. Is that … Kitty?”  
  
Phoebe: “How many was that?”  
  
Celeste: “What I want to know is what kind of amazing vibrator she’s using.”  
  
Emma glances up from her magazine. “Illyana.”  
  
Three mouths opened in identical Os.  
  
Emma looks up at the ceiling and shakes her head. “Don’t assume just because you can’t read a second mind that a person is alone. That’s a dangerous mistake.”  
  
“Illyana can—?” Phoebe starts.  
  
But Celeste interrupts with, “Make a girl come like _that_?”  
  
“Um, excuse me, I was going to say ‘have sex?’”  
  
“I know, that’s why I asked the better question.”  
  
“Why are you asking me a question to which you obviously already have the answer?” Emma asks. “Stop eavesdropping on Professor Pryde.”  
  
“She projected,” Irma protests.  
  
Phoebe shakes her head. “She doesn’t know that. She probably hasn’t had sex in a base with five telepaths, like, ever.”  
  
“Does Illyana only like girls?” Celeste asks Emma. “Bobby’s going to be heartbroken. We should go make sure he’s awake for this.”  
  
“That’s my girls,” Emma says, returning to her magazine.  
  
*  
  
Kitty gets quiet when she comes. She’ll make noises up to that point, but then silence—a holdover from us being kids. Just in case she’s going to accidentally phase, being quiet makes it more likely she won’t screaming-orgasm phase through the dining room.  
  
So when the sounds stop and it’s only her breathless panting, I hold her down, my hand on her breastbone, and watch her thrash and fist the blanket while I keep fucking her. I fuck her through two, maybe three, and then pull my sopping hand out and massage her until she’s coming again, not quite crying, but a few tears streaking the side of her face, pure release.  
  
My jeans are trashed from having my thigh behind my hand for most of this, using the force of my hips behind my thrusts. Her wetness streaks the outside of my thigh, with mine heavy and thick inside, seeping into the center seam of the jeans that’ve been rubbing me just about the whole time. Gods I’m so sore and sensitive and right at that edge.  
  
I massage her and paint my jeans with her wetness, until she’s stopped shuddering. Then I roll onto my ass, pile pillows between me and the wall, and start working my jeans and panties off, sticky with sweat and other fluids.  
  
Kitty drags herself up on one elbow to watch, eyes half-lidded with exhaustion and pleasure. Satisfied cat look now, having eaten multiple canaries. She plays her fingers across my leg toward my aching wetness, but I grab her hand, bring it to my lips and nip at her fingertips. I’m not sure how long this will last and if I only get a few memories from this, there’s one I very much want.  
  
“No,” I tell her. “I want your mouth.”  
  
She lifts my leg and slides under it, on her belly, to lie between my open legs. Her hands on my hips, she puts her mouth on me. Tongue taking the measure of me, finding her way again in this familiar, new territory, drawing aching softness across my lower lips, over my clit.  
  
“Illyana,” she says into my softness, half-moaned. And her mouth settles around my clit, sucking gently, her tongue flicking.  
  
Resting back into the pillows, I grab her hands because they’re so strong and I need her to hold onto mine, so I won’t fall too far, so she can pull me back when I let go.  
  
She’s lapping and sucking and it feels like her lips have followed my clit along its length into my body and further, her breath moving the energy at the base of my spine, her tongue stroking up the channel of energy inside my body.  
  
I though I would come as soon as she touched me, but I want this to go on and on. My hips rock on their own, her head bobbing opposite the thrusts, her mouth coming down on me as I press up. All of this feels like the orgasm, from the moment her mouth touched me, but also the intensity rises, the power gathers—it spreads out through me and reverberates back, like sound hitting the walls of a canyon and redoubling, strokes of her tongue landing on me as the drum, vibrating and shaking.  
  
By the time I start feeling like a person in a body again, Kitty’s almost asleep, her cheek resting on my inner thigh. I stroke her forehead, the side of her face, watch a sleepy smile arise and fade. She’s fully naked now, having phased off her skirt and panties somewhere in the middle of all this, and I need to fit my body along the slope of her back, but that’s going to take some doing since we’re on top of the blankets.  
  
I pull her up in the middle of the bed, get a pillow under her head. She murmurs some question and I tell her, “I’ll be right back. I’m not leaving.”  
  
Teleport to my room for my blankets and then back to hers where I pile them over her and then crawl in with her. I nuzzle the back of her neck, inhale the scent of her mingled with a lot of sex, and fall asleep almost laughing at my good fortune.  
  
*  
  
Kitty groans in pain and I wake up, worried for the half-second before she says, “Wow that was exactly right.”  
  
“Did you take up masochism while I wasn’t looking?”  
  
“You’re one to ask,” she said. “How did you let me do that to your back?”  
  
“It’s not that bad,” I tell her. I had a peek at it in the middle of the night when I went to the bathroom.  
  
“You’re covered in scratches.”  
  
“They’re scratches. Like kittens make. They’re cute. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”  
  
“No, of course not, I’d have phased. I’m just so sore in all the best ways. No one around here is allowed to see me trying to walk the next few hours. And we have to do laundry when no one’s looking.”  
  
In addition to the clothing scattered around the room, the blanket that we slept on top of has some very conspicuous stains on it.  
  
“We could tell people you were eating in bed and you spilled a mixture of … maple syrup and milk and … um, caramel sauce?”  
  
“Well now I want pancakes," Kitty says. "Or waffles.”  
  
“Beignets? _And_ waffles? There’s a place in New Orleans. Everyone could use a day off.”  
  
“Let’s go!”


	2. Hour 10

“I need a shower before we go anywhere,” Kitty says.

We're still in a nest of blankets, arms around each other. I look at the door, thinking about the layout of this base and if there’s a shower where we could be guaranteed privacy. “I can ask Emma if we could use hers.”  
  
“Illyana, no. I want breakfast. Quick showers and then food, okay?”   
  
My stomach’s been rumbling since I woke up. “Sure, I’ll meet you back here in a bit.”   
  
I teleport to my room for a few things and then use the showers on the students’ level so Kitty can use the ones shared by the teachers who aren’t Scott and Emma. Now's not a time when we could run into each other naked and have it be anything other than awkward and extremely distracting.  
  
Walking back to my room, I pass Irma who blushes just looking at me. Shit, should’ve extended my anti-telepathy magic over Kitty. Well, next time. I hope there’s a next time.   
  
“Sorry,” I grumble.  
  
“It’s okay,” she says, and more quietly. “How did you _do_ that?”   
  
“Block my thoughts? It’s some pretty complicated magic.”  
  
“No … the other part." She's blushing even more now. "The part we could perceive from Professor Pryde.”  
  
“Did Emma never have _the talk_ with you three?” I ask.   
  
“She told us all the bad things. She didn’t say it could be like _that_.”   
  
Yeah I could get how the good things would be a pretty awkward talk for Emma to have with her kids.   
  
“I’m taking Kitty out for breakfast and I hope we’ll be gone all day, but after we’re back I’ll answer your questions best I can, okay?”  
  
“You’re the best,” Irma says.   
  
In my room, I find New Orleans-appropriate clothes—light jeans and boots, black tank top under a thin gray shirt—and toss a few key things into a small backpack. Walking along the hall to Kitty’s room, I feel like a teen again, and very much not. My stomach is full on angry-hungry, but that sensation still isn’t more intense than what’s at the base of my gut, between my legs, up my spine, in my fingers and tongue and lips—the memory of Kitty there and wanting her again.   
  
She calls, “come in!” to my knock and I open the door to find her sitting at her desk putting on eyeshadow. She’s in another skirt, blue this time. When did she buy this many skirts? Above that, the gray and faded blue striped sweater, below the skirt, boots that are basically sex: chunky heel, soft periwinkle leather with huge eyelets tied by a thick ribbon. I want to pull that ribbon free of its eyelets and wrap it around her wrists, leave the open boots on her feet, push up her skirt, bend her over that desk…   
  
“You like?” she asks, sticking one foot out and turning it slightly. “Marie—Rogue—made me get them. They’re really comfortable.”   
  
“You’re risking your breakfast,” I tell her, shutting the door behind me.  
  
“Really? I thought you were the queen of self-control, Rasputin.” She gets up from her desk chair and paces to me, panther-Kitty again.   
  
I can’t think. She strokes my cheek, rubs her thumb over my lips, then fingertips down the center of my chest to my jeans. Belt buckle open, zipper down, her fingertips slide between my jeans and underpants and my skin, far enough to find the wetness that’s renewed itself since the shower.   
  
My knees buckle—embarrassingly, awkwardly—she’s pulled down with me as she tries to catch me. We land in something soft, I don’t care what because she’s kissing me ravenously, fingers moving against me.   
  
I fumble a hand under her skirt, but I can’t do anything deft, just press into her through her leggings and panties. Her thigh is between my legs, backing up her fingers, giving me pressure to thrust and rut against.   
  
I’m closer than I expected and then I remember the hall and Irma and I should—magic—something—I break our kissing, put my teeth around the top of her shoulder, not too hard, trying to concentrate—her fingers are the magic here—I can’t focus on anything but Kitty pushing me into softness, insisting that I pay her back for last night, that I show her how much I need her. She’s moaning softly, writhing against me, likes my teeth just there, and there, at the base of her neck; whenever I bite, her hips buck.   
  
But I have to—the magic—I don’t remember—and trying not to come makes it worse. Kitty’s fingers pry me open, the force of my orgasm pulsing out, obliterating thought. I haven’t come like this in so long, broken open, tearless sobbing into her shoulder.   
  
She’s shaking silently against me. We clutch at each other, making sounds I pray no one can hear, sounds I’d be mortified if anyone but Kitty heard me make: pained and desperate.   
  
Kitty is … stroking my hair?   
  
“You okay?” she asks.   
  
“I’m extraordinarily good,” I tell her. “Pretty hungry, though.”  
  
She laughs. “I phased my fingers a bit, wasn’t sure if that was too much.”   
  
“Wasn’t. Just, I didn’t manage the magic. So the telepaths …”  
  
“Felt you?” she asks.   
  
“No, I’m always blocked. You.”  
  
“Oh. Oh no!” She ducks her head into my shoulder, but the quiver in her body is half laughter.   
  
I shift so I can get my arms around her more completely and realize my head is resting on my black jeans from last night. Under that is the blanket from the bed. Kitty stripped the bed and tossed the linens, blankets and our clothes in a pile by the door for laundry—which is what we’re lying in now.   
  
“At least they won’t know you did me in the laundry pile,” I grumble.  
  
“Kind of glad to know I can still make your knees go like that,” she says. “Let me change my panties and we’ll get breakfast and lunch. I can’t face anyone here for at least a day now.”  
  
“Don’t change,” I tell her. “I want you wet all through breakfast.”  
  
“I’m ... very wet.”  
  
I am too, but still probably not as much as she is. She’s always been able to get wetter than me, a fact I sometimes envy and always appreciate. I can only imagine how uncomfortable it’s going to be for her to have to sit through breakfast in her wet panties.   
  
“Good,” I tell her. “Let’s go eat and then maybe we’ll do something about that.”   
  



	3. Hours 11 and 12

At my favorite restaurant in New Orleans, over a pile of waffles and beneigts, with strong coffee in hand, I ask Kitty, "So what've you been up to?"   
  
I try not to stare at her too much—her adorably frizzing hair, her clever, bright eyes—as she asks back, "You don't know?"  
  
I rip a beneigt in half and dip it into caramel syrup. "I know that parts that involve boyfriends and space travel. You know what people gossip about. I don't know what you've been reading and thinking and working on."  
  
"Oh," she says. "Well that's a longer list with less drama. What about you? You ... had a lot more happen."  
  
I put the beneigt in my mouth before it can drip more caramel on the plate (and table cloth), try to dust off my fingers and get powdered sugar on my jeans.   
  
"First off, all those years ago, when we were teens, I didn't really die, not like regular people do," I tell her.   
  
"Then what happened? I saw you afterward; you’d turned into a kid. I sat with you so many times. We kept trying … you didn't survive the Legacy Virus."  
  
I reach across the table and wrap my fingers over hers because she looks so sad and I don’t want her to, even if I’m slightly happy that she’d be that sad for me. But heartbroken for how she had to grieve me.   
  
“That kid wasn’t me,” I tell her. “Not the same me as the person sitting here with you. Rahne found a copy of me in Limbo, a time echo. That's what the child was. That’s why she was so vulnerable to the virus."  
  
"But you were gone. Why didn’t you come back?” Her voice must sound too needy to her—not to me—because she pulls her hand away and wraps her fingers around her coffee mug.   
  
“I couldn’t. I was magically translocated, scattered across Limbo and other places I don't understand yet. But not dead. So when the witch did that chaos business and remade the world and remade it again, back to how it had been, she brought my scattered self together and then re-scattered me. I could see ways to cohere again. I was working on coming back here the way I wanted to, instead of the way I did."  
  
Kitty waits, sipping coffee and nibbling beneigts and I'm so grateful for—and remember how much I missed—her ability to read when I need a minute. Throwing my sword into Limbo, being ready to die, not dying, also not hurting for a long time, and liking that maybe too much. Then being dragged into a single body by Scarlet Witch, only to be cast apart again … and still I’d have been fine, except for …   
  
"Belasco," I say finally. "That gross-ass fucker."  
  
Kitty laughs with me, humor in neither of us. Her laugh is uncomfortable. Mine dark.   
  
I grumble, “If I had any questions about his disgusting intentions, he answered them by thinking he could recreate me. As if. He made nothing, only dragged dispersed parts of me closer to him. And he called out the worst parts of me first. .."  
  
"But you killed him,” Kitty says, setting her coffee on its saucer with finality.  
  
"No. I put him in the ground of Limbo. Killing him would've given him too much power. And we know people can come back from the dead. I nullified him. He'll die eventually, I suppose, but by then it will be much harder for anyone to bring him back."   
  
"You just left him in Limbo?"  
  
"Not left. I scattered him under the ground, a bit like I'd been, but with none of his power."  
  
"So ... he could come back?" Kitty asks.  
  
"I doubt it, and even if he did, he has no Elder Gods to call on. He's just a man now. A weak, sad, man-child who doesn't know what true power is."  
  
"You do?"  
  
"Nope," I grin. "But I know that I don't know. And I know what to practice to head in that direction."   
  
“The Elder Gods,” she says and stops.   
  
I remember how angry she was for months after Legion and I destroyed them. I’d hoped some of that anger was displaced frustration about Piotr, but it can be hard to tell with Kitty. Sometimes her openness about most subjects makes the few she hides harder to see.   
  
“Go ahead and say it,” I tell her.  
  
"You could've destroyed the world using Legion to destroy the Elder Gods like that! Our whole world. You really thought you could decide to take that risk on your own?”   
  
“Have you thought through the alternatives?”  
  
She shakes her head at me. “You could’ve told me and we would’ve gone to Scott and explained it to him.”  
  
“That would’ve been like you trying to explain to me how to rewire a smartphone when I don’t even know how to take the back off it without breaking everything. I would have had to say: I have the magic for this, trust me. And would you have trusted me?”  
  
“Maybe.”  
  
“Would Scott and the others? Let’s say some do and some don’t. Now I’ve created a war between mutants. Or most don’t. Then I have to fight my friends in order to save the world. Maybe you win and lock me in the X-Brig and I get to watch the Elder Gods destroy you all.”  
  
“They weren’t an immediate threat.”  
  
“We knew they’d keep trying to invade Earth and it’s likely they’d succeed eventually, so once I had the magic worked out, why wait?”  
  
“So that you wouldn’t lie to us.”  
  
“Katya, do you understand that the only downside to the way I did things was that fewer people trust me in a world where already few did? No one died. How many lives is my reputation worth? To me, zero.”  
  
“Trust isn’t just about reputation,” she insists.  
  
“I know. That part was harder. But I’d rather you be alive and not speaking to me than the other way around.”   
  
“You should’ve told me.”   
  
“Maybe. I suspect we’ll never know.”  
  
“Why Legion?” she asks.  
  
“That wasn't just Legion. I needed Legion's help not only because he's an omega mutant—and not only because he deserved that chance to save humanity—but also because he is uniquely suited to contain multitudes of souls. I realized that with the right magic, his strength of being and ability to contain multiple personalities could be extended beyond his identities, beyond the present time."   
  
"You've lost me. And don’t say that smartphone analogy again. It’s not the same.”  
  
"Legion and I opened a pathway to the future, to the souls of unborn mutants. We channeled their power through him to nullify the Elder Gods who would otherwise destroy them."   
  
"Oh ... that ... how? Why didn't you tell us?"  
  
"You don't even quite believe me now. Would anyone have believed me then?"  
  
"I want to believe you,” she says, completely earnest. My Kitty, who always believed in me when we were young.  
  
"I know. Katya, I grew up doing magic that I never had to explain to anyone who didn't already know more than me. And most of the time, I was only told to do it, not explain it. I felt what Legion and I could do, but couldn't describe it in a way that I thought anyone would listen to or let me do. It's like if surgeons had to explain procedures and get approval from non-medical people every time they opperated; many more people would die."  
  
"But you were doing surgery on the reality we all live in. What if you were wrong?"  
  
"I wasn't. And I did ask people in the future. Stephen and Clea Strange, Shuri, Sera and Leah. They metaphorically checked my math, though magic isn't like that."   
  
“You didn't tell us that either, just sat in the X-Brig."  
  
"Well by then I was angry.” I admit. “You know how I get when I'm angry."   
  
"Very sulky."  
  
"I was not sulking!"  
  
She smirks and goes to use the bathroom.   
  
When she gets back, I ask, “Do you want to find a hotel, spend the night here? Emma says they don’t need us before tomorrow at the earliest.”  
  
“You asked Emma? Why? Oh, because she has telepathy.”  
  
“Uh, no, that’d be rude since she can’t answer me that way. I just texted her and Scott and she got back to me first.”  
  
“What did you ask?”  
  
“I said: _I took Kitty to New Orleans, can everyone live without us for a night_?”  
  
“And she said …?”  
  
“Do I have to tell you?” I ask.   
  
“You kind of do.”  
  
“She said: _take a few days. I hope you packed well, or are packing._ ”   
  
“Packing what? Like we should expect danger?”  
  
She genuinely looks worried and I’m trying not to laugh. “When have I ever packed heat? I carry a magical sword inside my body. You know what packing means in a lesbian context, right?”  
  
“The soulsword is inside … I always thought … wait, why would Emma care if you’re packing the lesbian way?”  
  
“She wants us to have a good time.”  
  
“Emma?!”  
  
“We’re kind of friends,” I say, trying not to wince as I think about all the times the New Mutants fought the Hellfire Club. "We go shopping and stuff, but not like you go shopping with Rogue, apparently."   
  
Kitty swings her legs out from under the table and turns her boots back and forth in the bold, mid-day sunlight through the windows.   
  
“You know,” I say slowly because—now that we’re done talking about me deceiving everyone to save the world—and have apparently tabled the subject of where the soulsword goes when I’m not brandishing it—I’m starting to think in more detail about what we did earlier today and what I’d like to do tonight. “When I first saw them I wanted to pull those thick, ribbon laces out and tie your hands with them and then do whatever I want. No phasing allowed.”  
  
“Yes,” she says.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Yes, Illyana. Why haven’t you done that yet? It’s been hours.”  
  



End file.
